I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor.

Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.